California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Arizona are rapidly careening toward bankruptcy. Other states aren’t far behind. In Colorado, Gov.-elect John Hickenlooper will be greeted with the prospect of a budget deficit as large as $1 billion. Tax revenues are sagging as a consequence of a weak economy and high unemployment.

But the heart of the problem is the unsustainable level of government spending and indebtedness driven by a cornucopia of entitlement, health care and welfare programs, along with overly generous government employee payrolls and lavish pension plans that have dwarfed growth in private- sector compensation in recent years.

Our federal government is also upside down financially, only with more zeroes at the end of the numbers. Given its relative size, the feds count red ink in trillions of dollars rather than billions. The crisis is more imminent for the states than for Washington, however, since states (like Colorado) are constitutionally prohibited from running deficits and don’t have the option of printing money to make up the difference.

Overseas governments are in a similar pickle, and their citizens are doing something about it: They’re revolting (double entendre intended). In France, labor unions and students have staged protests and general strikes, outraged over the government’s perfectly reasonable proposal to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. Sacre bleu! In London, student protesters expressed their opposition to college tuition increases by vandalizing the Milbank Tower skyscraper, breaking glass and throwing objects from the roof at police on the street below.

Last week in Spain, disgruntled air- traffic controllers launched a wildcat strike, shutting down the airports. And their prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, is a socialist!

The prototype for all this was the rioting in Greece last spring when angry mobs of government workers, anarchists, communists and assorted rabble-rousers wreaked havoc over austerity measures forced by that nation’s looming bankruptcy.

Is this is a preview of coming attractions for the U.S.? If so, it will be an exercise in futility. This is a revolt against reality. These nations spend a much smaller share of their gross domestic product on defense than we do, and they’re still going broke. This is about the inevitable collapse of the democratic socialist welfare state. In the name of “social justice,” compassion knows no economic bounds. Well, the bounds are there whether or not democratic socialists know or care about them. In the prophetic words of Margaret Thatcher, “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

Our current spending levels exceed our practical tax capacity. No nation can tax itself rich. It can only produce itself rich. Excessive tax rates are the enemy of production and a barrier to the creation of societal wealth. You can soak the rich, spin-dry them and run them through a ringer, and you still won’t come up with nearly enough revenue to close this runaway spending gap. And then who’s left to soak?

The economic solution is obvious: Government must spend less — much less — on all kinds of things at the federal and state levels. The political solution is problematic. President Obama’s federal deficit commission has poked some sacred cows but not nearly hard enough. For example, Americans are living longer, so they’ll have to retire later. Commission co-chairs Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles acknowledge this but can’t bring themselves to bite the bullet. They recommend that the full retirement age be gradually raised from 67, under current law, to 69. That’s reasonable, but they don’t get all the way there until 2075. That’s 65 years from now!

American colonists revolted against King George III because they were oppressed by an undemocratic government. The grievance today of revolting leftists worldwide is that they’re not given enough by democratic governments. This is a formula for economic ruin.

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